re: Here is an excellent article on Putin and the United States

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I found it interesting that they took the biggest gamble with the election.

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Well I'd argue that invading and annexing parts two different countries is a bigger gamble than releasing some emails and running a Reddit/Facebook campaign.

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Things like timing, content, and so forth in order to create maximum chaos would need a little bit of input.

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One would have to assume that maximum chaos was achieved in the first place for that to be true.

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Putin seems to have a mighty strong blind spot when it comes to his own country's history of failure in that same arena.

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Putin’s blind spot of his own failures doesn’t make him wrong about ours.

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Putin reminds in a lot of ways of an Principate-era Roman emperor.

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I haven’t listened to that Hardcore History episode yet

Maybe the answer is to ease the friction between our countries. The friction between our countries is incredible counterproductive. Both of our infrastructures need cash infusions that are being wasted on hostile posturing.

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Here is an excellent article on Putin and the United States

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A lot of it is anecdotal journalism, but it does do a very good job of painting a good picture for the reader about what the Russian environment is like. It gives you a good feel for what people there are thinking, and how the Putin government operates and embarks on big, risky hybrid-warfare destabilization projects.

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I especially found the parts about Putin’s views towards US hegemony enlightening.

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The second part titled “History” is the part I really found interesting.

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That was the worst part, because it's just recycling over-simplified, half-baked rhetoric that could just as well come from college freshmen watching Noam Chomsky lectures and criticizing American hegemony and "unipolarity" and the concept of a nation-state ... and all that tired old crap.

The world is a messed up place, and every country has a checkered history, but the dumbest thing you can possibly do in such situations is to strike a pose of false sophistication and moral equivalency. That's the route of anti-American Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan riff-raff. Or to update that for more recent times, anti-American Jill Stein and Donald Trump riff-raff.

I think the best part is Part III ("The Player"), where it discusses the “last day of Pompeii" attitude among the criminal oligarchs of the Putin hybrid-state. Then, about half-way down Part III, it talks about how even the ultra-Russian Crimean separatists had realized that they were better off being Ukrainians:

"But the rush of patriotism provided by the Crimean annexation proved fleeting. Connected by land only to Ukraine, Crimea is hard to supply from Russia. The peninsula is facing severe water shortages in its near future, and tourism, a mainstay of the local economy, has plummeted. On a recent trip there, I was told by even the most ardently pro-Russia locals, Cossacks who had staged protests supporting Moscow in 2014, that they had come to regret their stance. The violent lawlessness and corruption of Moscow had reached their home, and life had become much harder as Russian citizens. In some ways, they missed being Ukrainian."

It also mentions the problem of Putin facilitating the outflow of Sunni Islamic terrorism from his own country, which will likely make the problem worse in the Caucasus.

Some might also do well to heed a couple of paragraphs near the end from Part IV ("Double Down"):

" Some Americans, including the current president, believe that if only we could identify where our interests align, Russia could be a good partner. But those who have dealt with Putin for decades understand that this is, at best, a fantasy. “Putin defines Russia’s interests in opposition to—and with the objective of thwarting—Western policy,” Ash Carter, Obama’s last defense secretary, told me recently. “It’s very hard to build a bridge to that motivation. It makes it ipso facto impossible” to “work cooperatively with Russia.”

Putin is not a supervillain. He is not invincible, or unstoppable. He pushes only until the moment he meets resistance. His 2014 plans to lop off the eastern third of Ukraine, for instance, broke apart against the surprisingly fierce resistance of the Ukrainian army, and Western sanctions. Obama sanctioned the Russian government for its election interference during his last days in office, closing those Russian compounds and expelling some diplomats, but it was a belated, feeble response. More-forceful options—revealing intelligence that would embarrass Putin, or introducing truly crippling new sanctions—Obama decided not to use. "

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I loved the line about Putin played by blackjack and not chess or checkers.

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Not surprising. I think you might love that old "chess vs. checkers" metaphor more than anyone I've ever come across.

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I think also think you can support Trump, believe there was no collusion

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Yes. But you do realize that the Julia Ioffe article in no way counters the suggestion that there was communication and/or cooperation between the two camps? In fact, the ad-hoccery illustrated in the article (with uncoordinated Russian operations acting in a duplicative and improvisational manner) goes a long way to explaining why the Trump campaign kept getting solicitations from various Russian intelligence service (RIS) freelancers so late in the campaign. They kept getting them (and also kept lying and covering up the fact that they were receiving them), because the RIS freelancers were not on the same page with each other, but rather, were competing against each other, treating the situation like those Russian hackathon contests.

They are not conspiracies.

Russia is not our friend and should not be thought of as any kind of friendly nation.

I live right there. Trust me, they are not our pals.

Cute girls though!

Anyway, I don't want to belabor my fierce opposition to cooperating with Russia as a matter of foreign policy and American interests. It's probably more important for now to focus on the need for more robust counterintelligence against Russia on the domestic front.

There have been several good articles that have come out the past several days, including Ioffe's, but I would like to highlight one that came out as a sort of follow-up to Ioffe's. It's by John R. Schindler writing at The New York Observer: " The Truth About Espionage."

I want to highlight his work, because he's an example of a guy you would probably have an affinity for. He's vociferously anti-neocon, but he's also a respected "realist" foreign policy expert, in line with people like Scowcroft, Baker, and Kissinger. He was in the U.S. Navy Reserve, then worked for the NSA for a decade doing counterintelligence in the Balkans, and was also once a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College at Newport, RI.

The point is, this is a guy who hates over-aggressive foreign policy, who hates sensationalist politics, and who hates exaggerations and over-reactions about Putin and Russia (which is indeed the whole point of his Monday article), yet he is firmly in the camp of those who believe that the Trump campaign cooperated with RIS. So you might not want to listen to Laurence Tribe or William Kristol or Franklin Foer or Benjamin Wittes or Evan McMullin or Eric Garland or Ezra Klein or Matthew Yglesias ... or a whole bunch of other people. But why not listen to John Schindler?

Anyway, here are some interesting snippets from his article:

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As we finish out the year 2017, America is in the grips of spy-mania. ...

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However, it's dangerously easy to imagine a bigger and better-planned conspiracy than actually existed. By their nature, Chekists like Vladimir Putin excel at tactics, particularly the shady and spooky sort, while lagging at strategy. When you're caught up in the intricate nitty-gritty of clandestine spy-games, it's easy to miss the bigger political picture.

This increasingly seems to be the case with Russia's intelligence operations in 2016. In The Atlantic, Julia Ioffe has a new piece that convincingly portrays the Kremlin's pro-Trump activities last year as the unexpected triumph of ad-hoccery. ...

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To anybody acquainted with Russia's spy services, Ioffe's account rings true in its depiction of aggressive clandestine operations without much defined strategic purpose. It was persistent American weakness in counterintelligence combined with our already dysfunctional politics that got Moscow's job done in 2016, more than any innate Putinesque genius.

This means that it's high time to finally take countering foreign espionage seriously while assessing its significance in a balanced, analytical fashion, free from bias and panic. Fortunately, there's ample historical evidence to go on. Let's take the example of the spy-mania of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Senator Joe McCarthy convinced millions of Americans that Washington was teeming with secret Red agents burrowed deep in our government. Although he was never more than a boozy charlatan, McCarthy was more accurate than not in a very generalized way: Our nation's capital indeed was swiss-cheesed with Kremlin spies.

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It seems unlikely that anyone associated with Team Trump will turn out to be an arch-traitor at a Rosenberg or Weisband level. Instead, just as depicted by VENONA, unmasked Kremlin agentry will involve a bunch of disloyal Americans doing a myriad of illegal things to clandestinely aid Moscow, cumulatively leading to diplomatic and political pain for our country and commensurate gain for Russia.

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That statement was true then, and it's equally true today. Spies frequently make for better movies and novels than reliable intelligence sources. While it's important that Robert Mueller and his investigators unravel the full extent of Kremlin intelligence operations against our country in 2016--particularly because there's every indication that Moscow will do the same again in 2018 and 2020--this needs to be done with seriousness, not sensationalism. Counterintelligence work driven by politics rather than facts can prove ruinous, as Senator McCarthy demonstrated.

Russia's awareness of our politics and national security extends far beyond its secret agents and online spy-antics. As I've explained before, there are troubling indications that the Kremlin has been able to read America's classified government communications for years; here traitors like Edward Snowden likely played a catastrophic role, although there's evidence that this problem predates Snowden's defection to Moscow in mid-2013.

If Moscow has been reading America's secret mail, this might explain many of our egregious foreign policy missteps in recent years. It also indicates that our counterintelligence problems extend far beyond Team Trump and the 2016 election. Which would be exactly what a savvy old spymaster like Max Ronge would expect, looking at the evidence at hand.

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Yeah, I'm a dick. You're right though. It was unnecessary and I took it out, and I should try to avoid being like that in the future.

The biggest problem most people have with the hacking theory here is that it is increasing the tension between Russia and the USA. Most people support Trump not because he is anti-establishment but because he talks about improving Russia-US relations.

It's the 24hr networks that are making things worse in that regard